


Changes and Constants

by SkyisGray



Series: Ipseity [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: AIM - Freeform, Bridge Jumping, Brooklyn, Department X, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Healing from trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra, International vigilantes, M/M, Memory, Stealth operatives, Strange Magic, Three year jump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:39:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2732888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyisGray/pseuds/SkyisGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s autonomy, there’s trust, then there’s memory.  The final installment of Ipseity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Changes and Constants

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is done, at least for now, and I have such mixed feelings about that - but not about y'all. Thanks a thousand times over for your readership and feedback. It's been fantastic to hear your thoughts, wishes, and headcanons. 
> 
> Thanks to Ce for the initial brainstorming help, [Falcon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Wind_Ryder/pseuds/Wind_Ryder) for editing and suggestions, and [kaasknot](http://kaasknot.tumblr.com/) for final revisions and coining the term 'shooty robot.' 
> 
> Lastly, [Ewlyn](http://ewlyn.tumblr.com/) is working on some amazing art for the series, and shared [this](http://ewlyn.tumblr.com/image/104612201038) for the posting of this story.

_Time: 2130C_

_Date: 04 FEB 19_

_Location: 12N 21’ 0.22” 50E 12’ 27.07”_

The lower deck echoes under Steve’s boots as he drops 20 feet and impacts on the grated surface.  He ducks as a guard’s head swivels around. Then, a minute later, Steve creeps forward to follow in the man’s footsteps as he moves on to the next corridor of the ancient, tight-passaged oil ship.  

Steve plays at being a shadow, slipping down the cramped passages, keeping his breathing shallow and his heartbeat slow.  Any second, the guard could turn around to reverse his path, and Steve needs to be ready to hide.  

Normally he’d clock the guy. But, Steve can spot the curled, black cord snaking down the guard’s neck, and he suspects that the sparse security on this tanker make regular reports to compensate for their numbers.  Sure enough, just as Steve ducks behind a barrel, the guard does an about-face as soon as he passes a door marked with a neon green smudge.  He mutters a bored sounding report into his collar as he passes, and Steve takes it as a good sign.

“First checkpoint, lower level,” Steve barely breathes into his own comm.  He peers around the barrel hoping to spot the next guard.  

“Cabins, front lower.  Three dispatched,” G murmurs back.  

The next guard comes by in turn, and Steve follows him further into the belly of the ship on the balls of his feet.  He keeps his eyes alert for the red or green lights of a camera, but he doesn’t spot any.  This time, he ducks into a stairwell when the guard turns.  

“Second checkpoint, lower level.  Estimated less than 40 yards to engine room,” he whispers.  

“Back on bridge, upper level.  Two dispatched,” G reports back.  

“Wait for my mark,” Steve orders.  He spots the third guard and falls in behind him as they weave through the increasingly spacious hallways, finally leaving the cramped passageways snaking through the massive oil tanks behind.  Almost at his objective, the sole of Steve’s boot squeaks against the scummy tile as he imitates the footfalls of the man a yard in front of him.  

The man screams angrily in Arabic as he whirls on Steve, pushing him against the wall and pointing a gun in his face.  The cold metal presses against Steve’s jaw, probably leaving an angry ring, and Steve looks past the guard to see at least eight more sprinting in their direction.  

“Mark,” he says through his teeth as a second gun wavers dangerously at his jugular.  

“Not bad.  I’d say three yards from where the camera field starts,” G reports, before fingers reach forward to yank the earpiece out.  More hands spin Steve and pat him down, taking his pistol and his knife.  

He feels the scrape against his wrists as they bind him with wire, winding it around and around, until they tuck the blunt end inside the makeshift cuff.  Steve’s pretty sure that it’s going to bleed.

They frog march Steve into the camera field, and he struggles for G’s benefit.  

“Sir, we caught a man in the corridor!” one of the lackeys calls, his accent thick and excited.  They pull Steve into the pump room and force him to his knees; several lackeys stay to guard him while two more step through the entryway to the engine room where the leaders of the Hydra splinter group have set up their command center.  

Even almost five years after Hydra’s exposure and destruction, they’re still finding splinter groups like this one.  Led by Christine Mencken’s former colleagues and fleshed out by bafflingly loyal foot soldiers, they slithered into dark corners overlooked by the rebuilt SHIELD.  So many times, Steve and the other Avengers had thought they eradicated the last traces of Hydra, only for a threat like this to materialize on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden, sending brainwashing signals into Yemen to lull the people into blind pacifism on their government’s dime.  

Maybe the thing about cutting off heads is true.  

The two lackeys march back into the crowded pump room, and the scientist in charge of the aptly named “pacifying ray” follows.  He’s an older white man who would be rather distinguished and handsome looking if his chosen career didn’t see him spending most of his days in rusty ships.  As it is, he’s sallow and thin, and the ill lighting in the pump room makes his expression look a little unhinged.  

“You fools.  That’s Captain America,” he says almost calmly, like he’s been waiting for SHIELD to come after him.  The lackeys panic, and one of them pistol whips Steve in the eye; he shuts it against the sudden pain and swelling, vision reduced.

This would be a great time for G to come to his aid, but he’s worked with G enough times by now to know that he won’t compromise his stealth until he’s completed his own part of the mission.  Steve runs the math in his head to try to figure out how many guards are likely left on the bridge, and he hopes the number is small.  

The Hydra boss waves his hand to dissuade one of the lackeys from hitting Steve again, and he crouches in front of Steve, grasping Steve’s chin in his cold fingers to examine the bruise that must be blooming on Steve’s eye socket.  

“Where are your stripes, Captain?” the man muses, running his eyes over Steve’s blue Kevlar SHIELD uniform.  The spangled outfit, along with its shield, are back home in the states.  Suffice to say, Steve isn’t acting in the capacity of Captain America at the moment.  “He won’t recognize you without that garish costume.”  

Steve refuses to show emotion at the comment.  “Who?” he demands.  

The man straightens up and smirks at his victory.  “The Winter Soldier.”  He turns on his heel and motions for Steve to be dragged into the engine room.  

The engines are barely humming, a sure sign that G’s dealt with whoever was steering, but the large, silver machines that obviously don’t belong on the dilapidated tanker buzz with energy.  Those must be the source of the energy waves that are currently raining down on Yemen, soothing the citizens into a surreal calm which barely allows for work and activity, much less protesting and rebellion.  

A lackey adjusts Steve’s makeshift handcuffs to tie him to a pole in the middle of the engine room.  Unsure how crucial it is to the structural integrity of the ship, Steve can’t break the pole, so he waits.  

“I don’t believe you,” Steve insists calmly.  “The Winter Soldier would never work for Hydra.  You’re bluffing.”

“Fascinating,” the boss drawls.  He continues to work like Steve isn’t important enough to occupy his full attention.  “You’re the symbol of capitalism, and yet you Americans find it so hard to believe that someone would prize money over your blind patriotism.”  He completes his tapping and turns back to Steve, wearing the same twisted smirk.  “I assure you, he is on board this vessel, and he requested that he be the one to deal with you, if you showed up.”  

Steve stays silent, and the boss laughs.  “The world knows how he almost killed you in Pierce’s battle.  But I think they will not discover what happened here today for a long time.”  

A door swings open somewhere above them, and heavy footsteps start to descend the rickety staircase.  Steve steels himself, wishing he still had the earpiece that tied him to G.  He needs to know if that’s him, or if he’s still on the bridge taking out bodies.  

The lackeys shift uncomfortably as the descending footsteps come closer, and it’s clear who they think it is.  Apparently not everyone on board is as calm about the presence of a fabled assassin as the boss is.  Their unease is confirmed when the Winter Soldier comes into view and stands at ease next to the main engine.  

Steve stares at him and simultaneously flexes his wrists, snapping the wire which ties him to the pole.  He doesn’t move his arms, maintaining the illusion of capture.  

“You’re working with Hydra?” Steve asks through his teeth.  Steve can’t see the Winter Soldier’s eyes behind his dark goggles, and he has no idea what thoughts are lurking in his head.  The Winter Soldier crosses his arms over his chest, the black matte of his metal arm almost blending in with his combat gear.

“Oh, don’t worry, Captain,” the boss soothes.  His glee at orchestrating the meeting between Captain America and the Winter Soldier spills into his voice and expressions.  “He’s technically on loan from a different terror organization, Chyetirye Rasskaza.  Not that you’ll be alive long enough to bring back news of them to anyone.  You see, we’ve been telling you people for years that freedom is a burden-”

The Winter Soldier draws his SIG and shoots the boss in the face.  Blood spatters across the clean, futuristic lines of the brainwashing machines, and before the lackeys can react, Steve jerks away from the pole and punches the closest two in the head, knocking them both out cold.

He jumps over their unconscious bodies and grabs the next, pinching the nerves in the man’s neck and shoulders that crumple him.  He aims a kick at another lackey’s head while he lets the first fall to the ground, and he looks up to see that there’s only one lackey left between him and the Winter Soldier.  

The man raises his arms above his head, terrified.  “There are more men coming,” he says in broken English.  

“No, there aren’t,” the Winter Soldier tells him.  Steve punches the lackey, and he collapses like a sack of potatoes.  Steve moves to the machines and scans them for weak points.

“G, help me destroy these,” Steve calls as G pulls the goggles and muzzle away from his face.  He pushes his hair back with one hand and holsters his pistol with the other.

“The ship’s alarms will go off after it’s been drifting for more than thirty minutes out-of-dock,” G warns.  

“How much time does that leave us?” Steve asks. He doesn’t see a seam on the first machine, so he plunges his hands through the metal covering and pulls out fistfuls of wires.  

“Fourteen minutes,” G says.  He jumps up to grab a pipe on the ceiling and then swings his boots against the second machine, kicking it hard enough to dent.  It whirrs angrily as he rears back and repeats the exercise, almost giddy.  

“Are the guys on the bridge dead or unconscious?” Steve asks, continuing to slam and kick and rip.  

“Mix of both,” G tells him.  “Anyone who looked like they were going to start another splinter club got a headshot.”  Steve’s eyes are drawn to the blood leaking from the boss’s head where he’s sprawled on the floor.  

“Hydra’s a giant cockroach,” Steve complains.  He tears the fourth and final machine from its bolts on the floor and smashes it against the wall.  “It won’t.  Freaking.  Die.”

“I’ll look for more Hydra jobs,” G says earnestly.  Steve gives the machine a final kick and then smiles with one corner of his mouth at G.  Even though his eagerness falls more on the side of wanting more villains to take out, there’s a genuine rage against Hydra for what they’ve done to his brothers.  Steve can’t help but love it even as his eyes clearly see the blood on G’s hands for what it is.  

“But for now, I checked the Rasskaza messages, and I think I found us an AIM job,” G continues.

“Almost as good,” Steve promises.  He pulls his radio comm out of his boot to call the SHIELD submarines waiting patiently for his signal to clear the ship.  “You need to scram.  Can’t have the big, bad Winter Soldier here when my backup shows.”

“I’ll send you a message when I’m inside AIM and have worked out their info and schematics.  We’ll figure out a plan to break them,” G tells him.  He slips his mask back over his mouth but leaves the goggles hanging from a breast pocket.  

“Be safe,” Steve calls to him as G turns to leave.  G visibly scoffs, but his eyes are softer than they get when he’s flinging bullets and knives.  

“Bucky says hello,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves.  “Actually, he says something much sappier and stupider, but let’s keep it at hello.”  

“Hello back,” Steve says with a private smile.  G disappears, and Steve makes the transmission.  

SHIELD agents spill over the sides of the ship only a few minutes later, and they find Captain Rogers surrounded by bodies and mechanical parts, rubbing at some scratches on his wrists.  

 

 

Steve leaves Somalia in his rearview mirror and keeps the African coast on his left as he drives south.  He prefers to drive at night and execute reconnaissance during the day, so the stars keep him company as he bumps over uneven roads and cracks open the window to let the salty breeze sting his face.  

It’s been a week since the Gulf of Aden mission, and he’s been holed up in a safe house in South Africa as he waits for a signal to move out.  He’s eating a dinner consisting of rice and beans – easy to store and prepare, and fast calories - when he gets a text. He shoves a pile of maps and notes aside to see which phone pinged and grabs the sleek, black phone as opposed to the silver monstrosity issued by SHIELD.  

G’s the only person who can contact him on the black phone, and he isn’t expecting the assassin to check in today.  

‘He wants to see you,’ the text reads.  

Steve’s heart skips a beat, and he drops his fork more loudly than he means to against the ceramic plate.  

It’s been two weeks, four days, and almost six hours since Steve last _saw_ Bucky. (Not that he’d been keeping track).  And maybe saw isn’t the right word – he saw Bucky’s body with G at the helm just seven days ago on the ship.  

But _heard_ isn’t the right wording either, because he listened to a voicemail from Bucky only yesterday. (And only a dozen times).  

It’s been two weeks, four days, and almost six hours since Steve last pushed his nose against that spot behind Bucky’s ear that he’s favored ever since he was a small boy; the same spot that G, Axel, and Yasha all find too ticklish. Bucky’s just immune to Steve burrowing there, maybe.  

Eighteen days feels like forever, but unlike times in the past when Steve’s had to walk away from Bucky, this isn’t permanent.  That’s what gets him through the days when he doesn’t speak to anyone, or the days when his cuticles are stained with the blood of terrorists and dictators.  This isn’t permanent, and it won’t be much longer until he, Bucky, and the others are back under his roof and listening to the sounds of DC traffic outside.  

But for now, they can do the most good if G stays on top most days and sells his services to get inside major criminal organizations, feeding information to Steve and making sure there isn’t any record of the Winter Soldier being there before he and Steve take down the facility from both ends.  Chyetirye Rasskaza is a mystery-shrouded terrorist group of their own invention, designed to get G into places like Hydra and AIM as a double-agent, while Steve runs at the doors head-on, frequently getting captured in the process.  

This is Axel’s idea and Bucky’s tactics, so Bucky understands the necessity of their separation. It’s surprising that Bucky wants to break that pattern, and even more surprising for G to agree on a lark.  

It must be serious.  Bucky must need him, enough to derail G’s work in Johannesburg.  

He types back, ‘I can be there in 3 hours?’ because he’s still not sure what he’s dealing with, and G responds, ‘Stay put.  Coming to you.  Push mission back 24 hrs.’

Steve sees movement outside the compound just under three hours later, and he pulls aside a corner of the curtain to watch a dark, dusty vehicle pull up beside his white truck.  He rests his hand on his thigh holster when he doesn’t recognize the vehicle, but he knows the shaggy hair and tight shoulders of the person who climbs out of the car and weaves through the booby traps.  

He lets the visitor use the retinal scan to let himself in, and then Bucky steps into the sliver of light from the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.  

There’s a beat where Steve looks at him, and he still can’t believe he’s seeing the boy he fell in love with a century ago.  It’s Bucky in every way that counts – his big heart, his twisted sense of humor, and his tense grin – with all the extra things that have been piled on over the years.  Extra things, like the cybernetic arm, and the brothers.  

The same, but more.  

Bucky opens his arms, and Steve falls forward what feels like the length of the room.  He presses his chest against Bucky’s and winds his arms around him as he nuzzles into the soft skin of Bucky’s neck.    

“Which one am I?” Bucky breaks the silence after several minutes of inhaling and exhaling.  

“Don’t joke,” Steve scolds, finally pulling back to look into Bucky’s eyes.  The light isn’t good enough to read much more than the basic essence of ‘Bucky,’ which is so different from the others now that Steve knows what to look for.  He takes Bucky’s wrists into his hands and pulls him further into the safe house.  

In the kitchen, Bucky opens cupboards and studies Steve’s food and coffee supply.  Steve leans back against a cabinet and waits him out.  

“This expired four years ago,” Bucky complains, holding up a can of tomato soup with his cybernetic arm.  As jarring as the metal sometimes looks against his skin, particularly where it fuses with his shoulder, there’s something very balancing about seeing Bucky use his left hand again.  Steve doesn’t say anything, and Bucky sets the can on the laminate counter.  

“You tired?” he asks next.  He crosses the kitchen to Steve and slips his hands under the bottom of Steve’s t-shirt like he’ll read the answer in the twitch of Steve’s abdominal muscles.  

“I’m worried,” Steve admits.  

“Oh.  I just wanted to see you,” Bucky promises.  Steve’s suspicious, but he has no reason to suspect Bucky of outright lying to him, so he arches his back and lets Bucky’s hands drift up his chest.  Bucky reaches his collar bone, hooks a finger over the neck of Steve’s t-shirt, and pulls.   The fabric tears with a soft _rip_.

Bucky pushes the ruins of the shirt off Steve’s shoulders, and it lands as a rag on the kitchen floor.  

“This place better have an actual bed,” Bucky says.  

“It does, but I’m pretty sure Fury was the last person to use it,” Steve tells him with a grin.  He heads for the bedroom and watches Bucky follow over his shoulder.  

“Don’t care right now,” Bucky says.  Steve opens the door into the low-ceilinged room lit by the blue light of computer monitors, and Bucky plasters himself to Steve’s bare back, sucking a bruise into his shoulder as they walk into the room and collapse onto the bed.  

Steve twists around to get his hands on Bucky.  He’s still wearing the black combat leathers that G favors, so apparently he left Johannesburg without bothering to change.  His torso is criss-crossed by several straps and harnesses, so Steve gets to work unhooking them while Bucky kisses his chin, his cheeks, his forehead, and finally his mouth.  He tastes bitter tea on Bucky’s tongue, and he runs his tongue over the spot behind Bucky’s front teeth that makes him shiver.  Then, buckles finally unclasped, he pushes Bucky back so he can pull the reinforced jacket away from his skin.  It exposes the seam of Bucky’s shoulder where pallid flesh meets black metal, and Steve admires Stark’s handiwork before his eyes catch on purpled bite marks scattered across Bucky’s neck.  

“These look fresh,” he comments, not really needing an explanation.  Bucky gives him one anyway.  

“Yasha getting information from a pretty diplomat last night.  And I guess this morning,” he says.  Steve thumbs the marks and then bends his own neck to fit his teeth over the bites.  Bucky gasps as Steve bites down, covering some woman’s mark with his own and erasing the trace of anyone else from Bucky’s body.  

Objectively, Steve knows that he isn’t sharing Bucky with anyone else, but his wires do get crossed when it comes to evidence like this.  He doesn’t begrudge Yasha or Axel their own lovers, but he doesn’t want to think about it now either.  

Bucky looks at him with soft, knowing eyes as he finishes covering the marks with his own. Then Bucky rolls off, and they each take care of their pants, shoes, and socks.  Steve takes the gun out of his thigh holster and unstraps the knife from his ankle, resting them on the nightstand, and Bucky sheds his own weapons on the other side of the bed.  Between the two of them, they strip away an armory, and Steve huffs a laugh at the intense security.  

Then Bucky rolls back on top of him, bare as the day he was born, and Steve kisses him with all of the passion he’s been stuffing down for the last two weeks, four days, and nine hours.  

He trails his fingertips up Bucky’s sides, feeling the muscles contract under his fingers as Bucky widens his legs and lets Steve’s thigh cozy up to his groin.  Bucky lazily thrusts against it a few times as Steve threads his fingers into Bucky’s tangled hair. He pulls away, crawling backwards while looking Steve in the eye, and Steve crosses his arms behind his head to prop up his neck so he can watch.  

Bucky crawls the last few inches, kissing at Steve’s stomach and his thatch of blonde hair, opening his mouth to lick at Steve’s foreskin.  The sheen of his saliva against Steve’s cock shines in the dim, blue light from the monitors, and Steve curls his toes and grunts when Bucky slips Steve’s cock into his mouth and starts to suck.  

Bucky won’t take all of Steve into his mouth; there’s bad memories and flashbacks that he’s still making peace with there, and Steve knows that he’s not getting any deeper into Bucky’s throat than his soft palate.  That’s okay.  He carefully holds his hips still so that he doesn’t thrust, and he lets himself shiver under the hot pressure of Bucky’s mouth.  

Bucky sucks and bobs his head until Steve’s spine feels white-hot, then he pulls off and grabs Steve’s ankles, sliding them close to Steve’s ass to tilt his hips up.  Bucky wraps his flesh fingers around Steve’s cock and pumps gently while he ducks his shoulders and runs his tongue against Steve’s hole, slicking it with spit and slowly pushing his tongue inside as Steve’s body tightens like a spring and comes.  

Steve groans; Bucky’s tongue is still in his ass, and his hand is still sliding up and down Steve’s cock with the additional lubrication of his come.  It makes his brain feel fuzzy.  He manages to make himself sit up and grab Bucky’s cheek, pulling him up for a kiss.

“Missed you,” he says against Bucky’s lips.  

“Missed you too,” Bucky says, laughing into the kiss.  He pushes his own cock teasingly against Steve’s hole.  “Turn over.”

Steve obeys the order military-quick, which makes Bucky laugh again, and Steve settles on his elbows and knees as he hears Bucky rustle through his crumpled pants.  The sound of a packet tearing makes Steve’s cock twitch, and seconds later, he feels the silky coolness of slick against his hole.  Bucky pushes it inside with his thumb as Steve bites his bottom lip.  

“You clearly came prepared,” he says.  He imagines the conversation that must have happened inside Bucky’s mind, but it still seems off that Bucky and G had been willing to table the mission for this.

Bucky must sense his thoughts, because even as he pushes inside Steve, he grabs Steve’s neck with one hand and squeezes lightly.  

“While your ass is definitely worth an international booty call, Steve, it’s not why I came.”  He leaves the subject there and snaps his hips forward, grunting softly as Steve’s body opens up to him.  Steve drops his head against the thin pillow and grabs at Bucky’s hand on his neck, gripping Bucky’s fingers as Bucky thrusts again and again, reinvigorating the cold heat in his spine.  

Bucky starts to mumble a confused blur of Russian and English, with a bit of German thrown in, that he always slips into during good sex.  Steve hears the words ‘love’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘Steve’ mixed in with plenty of words that he doesn’t know, and he knows that Bucky’s about to come when his voice gets higher and breathier.  

“Damn, Bucky,” Steve murmurs back to encourage him, and seconds later, he feels Bucky’s rhythm stutter, and the slide of his cock inside Steve becomes even smoother and hotter as he comes.  

Bucky gasps, and Steve pulls Bucky’s hand off his neck, unbalancing him and making him fall forward.  Steve kisses the metallic palm, running his tongue across all the sensors that he knows are there, as Bucky weakly thrusts into him a few more times.  

Then Bucky pulls out and rolls onto his back, and Steve carefully snuggles up to him while making sure not to cover any of Bucky’s limbs with his own.  It’s still a major issue for Bucky that he not feel held down or covered during sex, so Steve strategically plasters himself to Bucky’s side and only rests his fingertips against Bucky’s chest.  

Bucky catches his breath and looks down at Steve’s leaking cock.  

“You can go again?” he mumbles.  

“Maybe,” Steve tells him noncommittally.  To his surprise, Bucky wraps an arm around Steve’s shoulders and uses it to curl Steve’s body closer to his own.  

“You can rut,” he suggests through half-closed eyes.  Steve hesitates, afraid to lean his weight on Bucky.  After a moment of Steve’s indecision, Bucky opens his eyes all the way.  “Do you not want to come against my ripped stomach?” he asks sarcastically.  Steve laughs and drops his weight, rubbing into the sweat and come on Bucky’s stomach while carefully watching his face for any signs of panic.  

His second orgasm is just as draining as the first, and he pulls away from Bucky after he makes a mess in the dip of his belly button.  On his side again, Steve reaches out and rubs it into the soft hairs on Bucky’s navel.  

“Remember that place we used to have when we were roommates in Brooklyn?” Bucky asks.  

“Which one?” Steve asks.  Bucky looks at him blankly.  “There was the place on Division Ave, and we lived there with a few other guys.  Then it got crowded, and we found that place on Rodney Street.”

“Rodney Street,” Bucky says.  He smiles bitterly.  “Forgot the name.”  

“Yeah, I remember Rodney Street.  One room the size of a matchbox.  Bathroom out in the hall.  One window that was drafty as hell in the winter, and didn’t let in any breeze in the summer.”  Steve lifts an eyebrow at Bucky and grins.  “Still paradise.  We never had privacy like that before.”  

“What did it look like?” Bucky asks.  His tone isn’t casual; he sounds desperate, which doesn’t make any sense.  

“Uh, it was on the third floor.  Brown, chipped door with a number 10 on it.  And then the floor inside was scuffed up wood, but we had carpets everywhere that we inherited from my ma.”  

Bucky looks like he’s drinking up Steve’s words, so Steve takes a minute to walk through the details of his memory as he continues.  

“On one side, we had that beat-up couch and a bed.  Left a pillow and a blanket on the couch whenever the landlady came in to make it look like you slept there, but we shared the bed.  It wasn’t even half the size of this bed, and the mattress was always too hard for you.  We had a table on the other side of the room with two chairs, and then a shelf with some pictures and trinkets on it.”  Steve pauses and thinks if there’s anything he missed.  “And there were pots and dishes hanging by the stove.”

“What color was the wallpaper?” Bucky asks, annoyed.  

“Ugly.  It was green and brown stripes,” Steve tells him.  

“What could you see through the window?” Bucky asks.  Steve’s getting more and more confused, but he remembers clearly enough.  He’d pulled a chair over to that window and drawn the street scene enough times that it’s burned into his memory.  

“Grocer right across the street, although his prices were too high so we never went there, and then apartment buildings.  Nothing special.”  Steve waits to see if Bucky will ask any more questions, and then he finally asks, “why?”  

“That’s where we live.  Me and the others,” Bucky answers.  It takes a moment for Steve to figure out what he means.  

Bucky’s told him before that he and his brothers can communicate by picturing an apartment in their mind and meeting there.  Steve’s never thought to ask about the details of the apartment, because it always seemed to pale in comparison with the much more pressing questions about the brothers’ existence in the first place.  Even back when Steve went to therapy with Bucky, before the Barnes brothers decided they were done talking with SHIELD about their past, it never really occurred to Steve that their shared mental projection might actually come straight out of Bucky’s memories of the real world.  

“So the apartment where the four of you spend your time, when you’re not on top, is basically our apartment from Brooklyn?” Steve asks to clarify.  It’s surprising, because Bucky usually wants nothing to do with Brooklyn.  On a whim, Steve asks, “Since when?”

“Since Axel,” Bucky tells him plainly.  So always.  Back when Axel blurred into existence, Bucky wouldn’t have been very far removed from Brooklyn at all.  Steve does the math and thinks it was less than a decade since he and Bucky had actually lived in Brooklyn.  So it does make sense why he picked that spot for the brothers to live and meet.  

“Can’t believe you all stay in that God-awful apartment when you could be imagining Buckingham Palace, or the Taj Mahal,” Steve teases.  Bucky sits up and turns to look down at him.  

“I’m forgetting it,” he says.  “That’s why I needed to see you.  I’ve been losing it for the last fifty years, forgetting the wallpaper and forgetting what the window looked like.  Everything’s out of focus.”  

Steve studies Bucky’s face.  He’s frustrated, but Steve can see panic underneath.  He can only imagine how it feels to realize that you’re forgetting where you came from.  He’s already getting tastes of it, realizing that he doesn’t remember the smell of his mother’s perfume or the sound of his father’s voice, but there’s nothing that he hasn’t been able to recall after several minutes of dwelling on it.

By the sound of it, Bucky’s been trying for decades.  

“I’ll draw it for you,” Steve soothes.  “Every detail.  As much as I remember.”  

“It’s been so out of focus,” Bucky continues.  “And yesterday, I looked around and I was sitting on the couch.  I’ve sat on it for at least a year, and I suddenly realized that it doesn’t go there.  It’s the couch from our apartment in Washington.  And then I realized that I’ve changed all the other furniture too.”

Steve reaches up to cup Bucky’s chin.  “What did the others say?”  

Bucky scoffs.  “They had no idea.  I think things only change in there when we all think them, so we’d all completely forgotten what it looked like in the beginning.  Axel also thinks we made it bigger.  There is a lot of space.”  

“Then you definitely made it bigger,” Steve smiles at him.  “It wasn’t big enough for the two of us, much less four of you.”  

Bucky folds himself against Steve’s chest, and Steve wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist loosely enough that it won’t feel constricting.  

“I’ll show you so you can remember, even if you don’t want to go back to living there,” Steve promises.  Bucky takes a shaky breath, and Steve rubs his back.  

“I don’t want to forget where we came from,” he says wetly.  “Sometimes I think it was hell until I saw you on that helicarrier, and then I remember that no, there was something before Hydra and Department X.  I think I’ve forgotten almost everything that doesn’t have to do with you.  I can only remember one grade school teacher, one boss, one store…”

Steve kisses him, not to shut him up, but because Bucky’s breath is hitching like he’s about to ramble.  He tries to ground him in the present, because he can’t reach into the past and help Bucky there.  

He kisses Bucky until Bucky calms down and falls into a faint, twitching sleep on his chest, and he runs his fingers over Bucky’s back as he thinks.  

Steve’s sleep in the ocean means that he’s more than sixty years closer to the memories of their childhood than Bucky is, and he knows that he remembers more.  He tests himself, running through the names and faces of neighbors, teachers, and coworkers, failing in some areas but remembering most of it, he thinks.  The war still feels fresh to him, and everything before that is recent enough, even if it’s coated with layers of optimism and petty worry that the war burned out of him.  

He could draw all the people and places he remembers, and list names and dates for Bucky for days, but it still doesn’t seem like enough.  It’s not fair that his own mind has all of these rich memories but Bucky’s, only inches away, can’t access them.  

He falls asleep loosely wishing he could touch his forehead with Bucky’s and share all of the memories of which Bucky feels the loss. Then he dimly realizes that there might actually be a way to do that.  

 

Steve wakes up a few hours later, rubbing his eyes and, when he catches a look at the clock, surprised that he was out for so long.  The bed is empty, but he’s all too used to falling asleep with Bucky and waking up with one of the others elsewhere in his apartment.  At first, it was awkward for Yasha, Axel, or G to wake up spooned around Steve or curled up on his chest, but they’re at the point where they just shove him away and ignore his erection now.  

It’s become one of the things about his relationship with Bucky and them that feels normal (even if it’s a little hard to explain to his friends).  

He gets out of bed and pulls new pants and a shirt out of his duffle bag, then he pads through the safe house to the kitchen.  His laptop is open and streaming BBC news on the kitchen counter, and one of the brothers is rummaging in the cabinets and apparently throwing away most of his food.  

Steve studies the man in front of him as he raises up on his toes to reach the top cupboard and takes a can out.  He inspects the expiration date and lightly sets it on the counter with a small _tap_ , so that rules out G.  And Bucky would still be in bed, so that rules out Bucky.  The last clue he needs is the laptop, which should have been his first clue all along.  

“Hey Axel,” Steve says as he brushes past Axel on his way to the sink.  He takes a mug that still has a few water droplets pooled inside off the rack and fills it up with water before putting it in the microwave.  “Want tea?”

“Sure,” Axel says with a smile.  He’s dressed himself in G’s combat clothes, but he hasn’t tucked his pants into boots, nor has he buckled every strap on the jacket.  

“What are you doing?” Steve asks as the microwave hums and rotates his mug inside.  

“Bucky said some of your food was expired,” Axel says, tossing one of the cans heavily into the trash can now that he doesn’t have to be quiet.  Steve huffs a laugh.  

“Yeah, but a lot of that stuff doesn’t go bad.  And I don’t know who’s staying here next or who even stocks this place.”  

“I’ll remind you to call it in,” Axel promises.  Steve finds a tea bag that’s escaped Axel’s cleaning and starts to hunt down a spoon for the sugar.  

“Bucky say anything else to you?” Steve asks a minute later as he switches out the mugs.  

Axel turns around and uses his arms to heave himself onto the counter, bringing him to eye level with Steve.  “About why he needed to see you all of a sudden?”

“Yeah,” Steve confirms with a sudden flutter of panic in his gut, wondering if the reasoning is more than Bucky let on.  

“Even though I’m technically older than Bucky, he’s been alive longer than all of us.  He’s got an extra twenty-odd years before any of us were around, and his memories from that time are so different from anything that happened after he was captured,” Axel says on a sigh.  Steve stirs his tea without saying anything and waits for him to continue.  

“He’s been losing them for a while, and I didn’t say anything because it wouldn’t have helped.  It makes sense; he’s old,” Axel says with a reluctant smile.  

“I’m old,” Steve fires back.  

“In terms of memory, you’re barely thirty,” Axel says dismissively.  “Bucky’s over one hundred.  He’s got some Greatest Hits that he clung to for a long time, but in terms of recall, it’s almost all gone.”  

“But he has you guys.  I know he told you so much about his life before the war, and what it was like without the serum and the heroics and the, you know, knowing what we do about the world and the power games in it,” Steve insists.  

“That’s true.  We’re like a journal,” Axel says.  “But we’re forgetting too.  If Bucky told me something back in ‘55, I’ve most likely forgotten it too.”  

Steve hands Axel a mug of steaming tea, and Axel accepts it with a quiet ‘thanks.’  Steve’s eyes feel hot just thinking about this – about Bucky cut off from the memories where he was happy and carefree and normal, at least compared to now.  Even though it’s as natural a product of aging as Axel says it is, Steve doesn’t want that for Bucky.  

He wants – even though he’ll never admit this to any of the brothers because they won’t precisely understand – Bucky to be able to pick up from 1944 and get those years of misery back.  He doesn’t want to blot out what Bucky went through, not exactly…but it isn’t fair that Bucky was cut off from his humanity as a young man in his prime, only to come back to himself in what should have been his twilight years.  

And he selfishly doesn’t want Bucky to lose anything from their shared childhood – the love story that he and Steve waded their way through in spite of conflict and danger, and the many amazing things that Bucky did and saw _before_.  The family that loved him no matter how much trouble he got into, and the neighborhood that shaped and molded the man Bucky became.  

Steve couldn’t bear it if Bucky lost all that.  

“He forgot his sister’s middle name the other day.  Almost had a panic attack like he hasn’t had in years, and when he gets those, it’s bad,” Axel tells him, and Steve closes his eyes.  

“It’s Elizabeth,” Steve says.  So it’s as grave as Axel makes it sound.  

“Shit.  He freaked out for hours and decided it was Angela,” Axel says, clunking his head back against a cabinet.  He takes a sip of tea.  

“But I know because I remember,” Steve says, the idea from a few hours ago settling back on him.  “There isn’t much from his childhood or his teenage years that I don’t know about, Axel.”

“You know he won’t use you as a crutch,” Axel smiles at him.  He shakes his head fondly.  “He’ll ask some things, but then he’ll feel like he’s relying too much and he’ll pull back and just let it happen, the stubborn ass.”  

“I don’t really care if he’s being stubborn.  I’ll talk about his past until I’m blue in the face,” Steve declares, and Axel laughs.  He clinks his mug against Steve’s and readjust his posture so he’s sitting straighter.  

“That’s one solution.  Not sure it will help if he just memorizes the facts but can’t actually remember,” Axel says.  

“What if,” Steve starts, then he pauses.  The memory of how Bucky had reacted last time is still heavy on his heart, but at least this time he understands the source of Bucky’s behavior.  

“Yeah?” Axel asks with a raised eyebrow.  But if Steve is going to talk to one of the four about this, it probably should be Axel for a host of reasons.  

“What if I was actually able to show him?” Steve suggests.  “Do you remember that psychic SHIELD wanted to scan your mind before they’d release you from their custody a few years back?”

“Huh,” Axel says slowly as he lets the implication of Steve’s words sink in.  “That’s…can that work?”  

“I don’t know,” Steve admits.  “I’ve seen Strange read minds, and I’ve seen him project thoughts into people’s heads, so I wondered if he could be a sort of conduit to share my memories with Bucky.”

“They won’t be Bucky’s memories,” Axel points out.  

“They’re all but.  We were each other’s shadows, and we told each other everything,” Steve argues.  He finishes his tea and waits for Axel’s deliberation to play itself out.  

“Find out.  And then I’ll talk to the others.  Because, obviously, it doesn’t just concern Bucky if you’re inviting some psychic to play in our head,” Axel says.  

Steve nods, heart racing.  Now that it’s out loud, it isn’t a flight of fancy any more.  It’s a plausible, perhaps realistic idea, and he wants to do anything in his power to help Bucky regain such an integral part of himself.  

He thinks, briefly, that there may be things he’s embarrassed by.  Too often, he felt inadequate and pathetic even though Bucky never wanted him to think that way.   Too frequently, he felt defeated and done.  

And if this is even possible, maybe it won’t just be his memories of Brooklyn that Strange shares.  Maybe there are more recent memories that Bucky won’t like, and maybe those will go too.  

Like the memory of crashing the plane into the arctic.  Or the memory of putting down his shield on the helicarrier.  

He doesn’t want Bucky to see those.  

But maybe it isn’t even possible, or maybe something else will come to them.  

Or maybe it won’t, and it won’t make Steve love Bucky any less if Bucky forgets how they first met or any of their other firsts.  

He realizes two things simultaneously – that he’s actually crying now, and that Axel’s talking.  

“…than that, he’s fine.  Good, actually.  Has a lot of ideas for the AIM infiltration, and he’s been dealing with being away from you pretty well.  Better than Yasha expected, which is why I’m winning that pool.”  

Steve snorts and wipes at his eyes.  He has no idea how the four of them keep track of all the pools and bets they have running at any given time, and the idea cheers him a little.  

“How’s Yasha?” he asks.  

“Good.  The asset’s been sending him out to deal with women and children, and he’s very diplomatic even when we’re clearly in the wrong.”  

“And G’s happy?” Steve confirms.  He runs through his check-in questions with Axel, because if one of them, any one, decides that this mission is too much, then they’ll stop.  

“The asset’s content as he can be, though I still have no idea why you call him that.”  

Steve shrugs.  “I can’t call him ‘the asset.’  It’s hard to say, and it’s impersonal.  And he hates ‘George.’”

“He does,” Axel tells him with a cheeky grin.  He pulls the mug out of Steve’s hands and carries both their mugs to the sink.  

“And you?  You’re still good with this?” Steve asks.  He walks up behind Axel and rests a hand on the back of his neck as Axel rinses out their mugs.  

“I’m always happy to hear that a member of Hydra’s dead,” Axel says baldly.  He turns and his smile morphs from a grin to the knowing, but tired, smile that will always mark him as the oldest of the four.  “We have to go soon.  I’ll let you say goodbye to Bucky.”  

“Okay,” Steve answers.  He never wants to appear too eager to get Bucky back, because he does love all four of them.  They’re parts of Bucky, and they’re each so interesting in their own ways.  But of course, they’re mutually exclusive – he can’t be with more than one of them at a time, and Bucky will always win out.  

“I’ll probably see in you in few months,” Axel tells him.  

“Keep ‘em on task,” Steve says with a little salute.  Axel holds out a single finger, and seconds later, Steve’s looking at Bucky.  

“Hey,” he says as Bucky looks down at his uniform and starts to fasten the buckles Axel had left hanging.  Steve shuffles forward to kiss him, tasting the tea Bucky didn’t drink in his mouth.  

“Hey.  Who were you with?”

“Axel.  We talked about you,” Steve admits.

“Figured you would.  Whatever he said, it’s not that bad,” Bucky assures him.  He finishes fixing his coat and splays a finger across Steve’s new t-shirt.  “Thought I ripped this.”

“I own a lot of black t-shirts,” Steve says with a laugh.  He pulls Bucky forward and tucks his nose behind Bucky’s ear, breathing him in.  

“Do you know if he showered?” Bucky asks, wrapping his arms around Steve’s shoulders.  Steve sniffs at Bucky’s hair.  

“I think so.  It smells like it, and your hair’s a little damp,” Steve tells him.  

Bucky pulls back and kisses the pad of each finger on Steve’s right hand.  He repeats the gesture with the left, and then he takes both of Steve’s hands and tucks them under his chin, squeezing them softly.  

“I have to go.  The asset wants to be in position in five hours,” he tells Steve sadly.  

“I know,” Steve answers, not moving.  Eventually Bucky sighs and pulls back.  

“I was hoping you’d be the more mature one today and make me go,” he says.  

“Nope,” Steve grins at him.  Bucky leans forward and brushes their lips together a final time, then he turns and walks away.  The door clicks as he lets himself out, and the headlights outside flare to life as one of the brothers drives away into the dark.  

Hoping that it gets back to Bucky someway, even if he isn’t on top right now, Steve texts him ‘Hate to see you leave, but love to watch you go,’ on their secure phone.  It pings a minute later, and G’s ‘This line is for work only,’ makes him laugh.  

He sobers as he catches sight of the cans and boxes in the trash and remembers his conversation with Axel.  He vibrates with the need to do something for Bucky, but it isn’t the time for that.  He’s got work he needs to do, work he’s already agreed to do, first.

But it weighs heavy on his mind in the coming weeks.  

 

 

G liaises with whoever’s in charge of the AIM base in South Africa, and less than 48 hours later, Steve sees several hundred thousand dollars deposited into the Cayman Islands bank account aligned with their fake terrorist organization.  He hits a few buttons to transfer the money, and within minutes, anonymous donations roll into the Rebuild Washington and Rebuild New York coffers.  

Then he picks up the black cell phone and fires off a text.  

‘CR got the protection $.  How long do you think we should wait?’ he asks.  The phone pings a few minutes later.  

‘Call off SHIELD.  Give me 4 days to make them feel safe,’ G responds.  Steve makes a note on his calendar four days from now and fires off a stay order to the SHIELD agents loosely under his command.  He’d sent them last week to barrage the AIM facility making robots responsible for recent attacks in London, Tokyo, and LA.  Even though SHIELD had never penetrated the facility’s defenses, AIM was scared enough to hire G.  

Which is exactly what Steve wants.  Only a few top SHIELD officials know what’s really going on with the Winter Soldier – Fury, Hill, and the Avengers.  Everyone else is under the impression that he’s working on his own for the highest bidder.  It grates at Steve to see Bucky’s name dragged through the mud, but it’s their only option if they want organizations like Hydra and AIM to warm up to G.  

And it’s not so terribly far off the mark as to offend G or the others.  God knows what G would be doing if Steve had really died the day of the helicarrier crash.  G’s only loyal to his brothers, and without Steve to ground them, their concept of justice can be a little off.  

‘What’s the best way to hit them once their guard is down?’ Steve responds to G.  It takes longer than he expects for a response to roll in, and when it does, he can practically see G’s irritation fuming in the letters.  

‘Bucky and Axel say wild goose chase.  Explain.’  

Steve grins.  ‘Excellent idea,’ he types back.  He gives G a minute to probably curse him out, and then he sends a second text to clarify what Bucky and Axel mea.

His eyes catch on the factory blueprints on one of his screens as he types, and he thinks the idea will work.      

 

Four days later, Steve jumps on top of the AIM base wall and perches there, waiting to see if anyone will raise the alarm.  It’s a large base, but most of the activity is concentrated in the factory where they’re constructing the ‘advanced’ weapons of destruction, so no one sees the man atop the fence.  Strangely, no sirens go off, and Steve drops to the ground.  The grass is dry and mostly dead under his feet, and he walks almost the length of the western wall with only the night to hide him.

Eventually, an AIM lackey spots him, but Steve knocks him out before he can hit any panic buttons.  

A second lackey cottons on to Steve as he skirts the corner of the factory. Steve kicks him hard enough in the head to put him down, and then continues his trek, ducking under windows as he goes.  

Steve moves forward and swings a door open, slipping inside.  As the blueprints indicated, it’s an emergency stairwell that leads from the ground floor all the way to the laboratories on the top floor.  

He finds G sprawled on the stairs, head thrown back and legs loose in a way that Steve really shouldn’t be thinking about until he’s A. with Bucky and B. not in the middle of a mission.  G smirks at him.

“You tripped a silent alarm.  They’re waiting in ambush for you,” he says in his usual, clipped way.  Steve gets a running start and jumps over him, then jogs the rest of the way up the stairs.  He stops at the landing on top and looks back down, not surprised to see that  G’s long gone.  

Then he takes a deep breath and barrels through the door.  At least ten lackeys are already on alert and poised to greet him, and he fires seemingly randomly, hitting computer banks and machinery but no people.   

He screams something about justice as he sprints forward, dodging and blocking bullets on his way to the main labs.  Doors swing shut and metal grates fall from the ceiling, sealing off the labs and offices of those with power and intel while the hired guns chase Steve through the upper floors.  

More than once he hears lackeys screaming for the Winter Soldier’s location as well as his assistance. G’s voice fills the factory via an intercom, benevolently giving the panicking men guidance.

“Intruder, Captain America, is in the building.   _All_ security in pursuit,” he commands.  “All security in pursuit,” he repeats as Steve crashes through a window and drops to the mechanical part of the factory below.  More eyes stare at him in shock and anger, and like upstairs, the leaders lock themselves away and barricade the doors while the lackeys give chase.  

Steve heads out into the base, feeling the impact of a few bullets against his body armor.  He grits his teeth against the pain, and he keeps running through the barracks, the armories, and the storage buildings.   

One goon gets lucky, and his shot connects with Steve’s arm where the bullet-proofing is weakest.  Steve cries out in pain and stumbles briefly before he regains his footing.

G’s voice snaps over the comm.  “Steve?  What happened?”

“I’m fine,” Steve grates out.  “What’s the status on the factory?”  There’s a pause.

“Factory’s clear of the hired guns; only AIM devotees here now,” G finally says.

“Blow it,” Steve orders.  Seconds later, he’s knocked off his feet by a flash of light instantly followed by a ground-shaking explosion.  He stumbles and stands upright again, turning back to look at the burning, smoking remains of the factory, and the thirty or so lackeys on his tail pick themselves up and gape at the twisted metal where their super factory used to stand.  

One regains his composure within a blink, and he fires at Steve again, barely missing his cheek.  

“Son, there’s not really a point now,” Steve says tiredly.  The lackey looks at Steve and then looks back at the factory.  He looks back at Steve and then he looks at the factory again.  

“Go,” Steve prompts him and the others as they gradually shake their way through the ringing in their ears and refocus their eyes.  “You can do a hell of a lot more with your lives, or you can end up like your bosses.  Go,” he commands.  

Slowly, they start to trickle away, but a few loyal lackeys stay and stare Steve down, undoubtedly facing a fierce inner conflict.  One raises his gun and aims for Steve again, and Steve shoots him through the shoulder.  After that, the others scatter in all directions.  

Steve holsters his gun and pushes his hair off his sweaty forehead.  His palms are dirty from falling when the explosion rocked the base, but he prefers their smudge to his hair falling almost into his eyes.  He stretches, popping his back and hopefully dislodging a few stray bullets from his Kevlar, and then he lets out the breath he’s been holding and speaks into the comm.  

“G?” he asks, heart pounding.  Something probably happened to the comm in the explosion, but not because anything happened to G.  G’s too good, too experienced to let himself get caught in that blast.  Steve just needs some physical reassurance in the form of seeing him or hearing from him right now.  

“G?” he asks again, dropping his weight onto his front foot and jogging back in the direction of the factory, despite the black, billowing smoke and the smaller explosions of robots blowing up inside as the flames tickle them.  

He rounds the building, panting from the discomfort of his wounds, and finds G crouched on the ground coughing.  “G!” Steve calls, panic lacing his voice, as he speeds up and practically slides into G’s body like he’s stealing home.  

“You okay?  Damn,” Steve says as his hands pat at G, searching for any shrapnel or wounds.  G raises his head to glare and tries to push him away.  

“’m fine.  Smoke inhalation,” he growls.  He tries to flinch Steve off, but it doesn’t deter Steve from hooking his good arm around G’s torso and lifting.  He swings one of G’s arms around his neck and walks them both away from the inferno.  

“You idiot.  How close were you when it blew?” he asks, exasperated and emotional.  

“I wasn’t,” G lies through his teeth.  Steve wonders if the bomb went off prematurely, or if there was a complication while G was exiting the facility.  He doesn’t look that dirty, but he’s clearly shaken, like there’s an issue with his inner ear.  And his lungs are obviously damaged.   “Call SHIELD and have them round up the runners,” G snarls, determined not to be incapacitated.  

“I will when you’re away,” Steve tells him gently.  He winces as G’s fingers find the bloody hole next to his armpit, and G bares his teeth at him.

“You need medical attention more than I do.  I’m fine,” he argues.  

“I’m not the one who was hacking up a lung just a minute ago,” Steve argues back.  

He gives SHIELD the go-ahead to move in and arrest any straggling agents as soon as he gets G off the premises and into his own vehicle.  Steve heads back to the safehouse and collapses onto the bed face down once he’s done a perimeter check and splashed his bullet wound with rubbing alcohol.  

He wakes up the next day, groggy from the healing process, to find Yasha sitting next to him and poking at his wound with what feels like a knife.  

“Mmmph,” Steve grunts in pain.  Yasha swats at the back of his head.  

“Don’t wait for your body to push the bullet out next time,” he scolds.  Of all four brothers, his accent is the heaviest, but Steve likes it because it reminds him that they’re not hiding anything.  

Yasha finishes digging out the bullet while Steve bites down on the belt Yasha hands him.  He smells blood and disinfectant in the air as Yasha cleans him up and wraps the wound with gauze, coughing intermittently.  Steve gives him a dazed ‘thanks,’ and then Yasha rustles the blankets behind him.  

Bucky curls up next to Steve, pressing his face against Steve’s neck.  

“I can explain,” Steve says warily.  

“Shut up,” Bucky orders.  Then, “We’re never doing that plan again.”

“It was a good plan,” Steve defends.  Bucky snorts, and Steve falls back asleep with Bucky’s breathing making him smile.

 

 

They spend five days of recovery in the safe house, most of which is devoted to sleeping.  Axel, Yasha, or Bucky change Steve’s bandages as his arm repairs itself, and Bucky’s lungs recover.

Then they split up again.  Steve goes back to New York to help the Avengers with a mission, more to show his face stateside than because he’s actually needed.  G travels up to Europe and becomes increasingly cranky as they wait for intelligence to find them a new criminal cell to destroy from the inside out.  

A SHIELD agent in Moscow calls in what could be a mission or an urban legend, and Fury and his international equivalents decline to investigate it after further discussion.  Steve tells Bucky about it on the phone one night just for something to say besides “I miss you,” and “I love you,” and “the world still doesn’t feel right if I’m not with you.”  

Bucky gets very quiet when Steve describes the intel, and Steve waits him out.  

“Sounds like Department X,” Bucky tells him quietly, and Steve’s blood boils at the idea.  “Not old school Department X.  But in the 80s and 90s, we heard them talking about robots that looked like humans.  It was cheaper, apparently, than raising and breaking real humans,” his voice peters off.  

“I’ll tell Fury that you think it could be the dregs of Department X.  You don’t, nor do any of the others, have to go back there,” Steve says firmly.  He regrets bringing it up, and he regrets making Bucky think back to any of his time with Department X.

But Bucky takes a breath.  “Nah, let’s check it out,” he suggests with bravado.

“Bucky,” Steve starts, but Bucky interrupts.  

“I’m serious.  If there’s anyone I want to burn off the face of the earth, it’s them.  And we haven’t actually been able to spend much time in Russia, but it’s Yasha’s homeland,” Bucky argues, soft but determined.  Steve snaps his mouth shut and thinks over Bucky’s words.  Maybe he’s right, and maybe they can handle this mission with only some residual unease.  

Or maybe this is a terrible idea, and it will set Bucky and the others back to blanching and flickering between the four of them like a rapid game of roulette whenever they dig around too much in their collective memory.  

“I’m telling the asset, and we’re going, even if you choose not to help us,” Bucky says stonily, and Steve decides that there are four people way more capable of making that judgment call than he is.  He gets his head back in the game and assures Bucky that they can go investigate and see if the LMDs are really a Department X plot. Even though he has a queasy feeling in his stomach, it’s worth it how happy Bucky sounds to have Steve’s trust.

In Krasnoyarsk, which Steve struggles to pronounce but the Barnes brothers can say as easy and natural as ‘New York,’ they rent a cold room and share body heat to keep warm.  Even G gets over his usual aversion to bodily contact and seems to spend his hours contemplating how to get his cold hands under Steve’s clothes in the most unexpected ways possible.  

Yasha seems to enjoy interviewing the locals and trying his best to blend in.  He gets to use his mother tongue and walk through the city freely, making whatever purchases of food or clothing he likes.  Even though Steve thinks he’s doing a seamless job, he suspects that it’s not so easy to play the average citizen when you were born and raised in a torture chamber.  

Slowly, between the interviews, newspaper articles, and the internet, a story starts to unfold.  About ten miles outside the city exists an orphanage that dates back to the imperial days, but the locals swear it was shut down several decades ago.  Now the lights are on and there’s steam coming out of the chimneys, but no one can recall hearing if it was reopening as a private institution or a state institution.  Actually, no one can really recall hearing that it was reopening at all.  

A few local children have tried to submit themselves, but they’ve been turned away.  No one’s sure where the children are coming from, and no one’s seen children around the facility at all, playing or working or doing anything.  But there’s a trail of international adoption records leading back to the orphanage, and some of the important couples who took the Krasnoyarsk children into their homes died under mysterious circumstances shortly after.  

The detail that really fascinates, and suggests that it’s more than an abusive, damaging home for unfortunate kids, is that a British couple had adopted a child from Krasnoyarsk and gotten into a deadly car accident while taking her home.  Officials found a wreck of wires and metal where they should have found a little girl, and that’s what caught the eyes of SHIELD intelligence.  

LMDs – life model decoys – aren’t unfamiliar to Steve.  He’s known Fury to use one, and Tony had actually suggested using them for the brothers.  He’d claimed that it was possible to download their consciousness into LMDs and cited a recent example of saving SHIELD agent Preston from being trapped in Deadpool’s mind as evidence.  

But Bucky and the others had deemed it too risky and shot the idea down.  Steve understands, even though he wishes so desperately that things were different.  He’d love to see the brothers actually interact, and he’d trade all of his new possessions, and more, to be able to see the others without Bucky slipping through his fingers.  

Of course, Bucky wouldn’t risk it.  The chance to have complete control of his body at all times paled in comparison to the chance that something could happen to one of his brothers.

And Steve suspects that he may not even want complete control of his body.  Axel’s right; it’s been a long time.  Steve has to honor that, even if it hurts.  

Steve pulls himself back into the present when G comes back from infiltrating a government building and stealing whatever information they had on the orphanage.  They spread the contents of the folder out on the floor and look over vague blueprints and extensive notes that Steve can’t read, and he warms them soup while Axel translates.  

“Basements,” Axel points out.  “Lots of assembly area.”  

“Does Department X solely work out of basements?” Steve asks, forehead wrinkled.  Axel freezes for a second, but he’s reaching for his soup and stirring it with a calloused finger before he answers.  It’s the kind of thing Steve’s supposed to pretend not to notice.  

“They usually have a facility and keep us – or whatever their highest priority is – in the basement.  Lots of levels of security for someone to fight through, or us to fight out of.  I got us out though, once.”  He sounds proud.

“So the basement is for assembly, and then the rest of the orphanage looks normal and safe when dignitaries come looking to adopt a Russian toddler,” Steve hypothesizes.  “Then the LMD murders the parents and/or steals state secrets and returns to base?”

“Definitely sounds like Department X,” Axel tells him wryly.  “I just didn’t know they had a base in Krasnoyarsk.  There’s not much out here, and they always seemed to stick to major cities.”  

“Maybe they changed their MO when the Soviet Union folded and they lost some of their KGB funding,” Steve suggests.  He looks at the yellowed photographs of the orphanage almost a century ago and compares them to the photograph on the international adoption website.  In both photos, there are lines of scrubbed, blonde children arranged on the front steps and squinting into the camera.  In the old photos, though, the children look anywhere from scared to furious, and they’re flanked by cross-faced nurses.  In the most recent photo, the children are smiling happily without any adults in sight.  

“It sounds like it could be them.  It’s just…almost tame.  A hell of a lot of work for a few murders and some stolen laptops, even if they did contain EU secrets,” Steve tells Axel.  He picks up a pen and starts to take notes on the blueprints indicating entrances and exits into and from the building.  

“Yeah, the world doesn’t have an unlimited supply of Karpovs and Lukins.  That type of genius only shows up a few times a century,” Axel says with a dangerous smile.  He sips at his soup, hand wavering only slightly.  Steve thinks he’s done, but a minute later, Axel speaks again.  

“Bucky was – we were – their masterpiece.  They could only do it once, and they threw everything they had into it.  Sometimes I think about that, and I wonder if we somehow leached their resources from other places.  If, maybe, they would have done even more fucked up things, but we were like a lightning rod, and they poured most of their energies into us.”  He sets his mug down.  “I guess I’m happy, if that’s true.  This opinion is not widely shared among my brothers,” he says wryly.  

Steve’s reaching before he makes a conscious decision, and he gets his arms around Axel’s waist and buries his face in his shoulder.  Axel pats his back, awkwardly, as Steve gasps through the few initial breaths that prelude most crying jags.  He gets it under control but doesn’t let go of Axel.  Just because he’s cold, he tells himself.  

“Would you forget it if you could?” he finds himself asking.  He regrets it almost instantly, because they’re on a mission and he’s promised himself not to bring up the shaky issue of memory until they’re in another calm spot.  But he’s been thinking about it near-constantly, playing with the idea of sharing his memories with Bucky, which dovetailed all-too-quickly into the idea of erasing the bloody spots burned into Bucky’s mind.  Or at least the worst of them.  

“No,” Axel says firmly, effectively killing that line of thought.  “And Bucky wouldn’t either,” he says like he can read Steve’s selfish wonderings.

Steve pulls away quickly, feeling like the lowest form of friend.  Axel grabs him by the arm before he can stand up.  “Hey, it’s understandable.  I get it – sometimes I wish I could bear that for the three of them and let them be happy and carefree, not knowing how we got here.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But it’s too deep, okay?  It’s too much a part of who we all are.  Getting rid of it would be a sick lie.  ‘He who forgets his past is lost,’” Axel quotes something, or at least Steve thinks he quotes.  

Steve sees an opportunity.  “I’ve been emailing with Dr. Strange.  He thinks he can share some of my memories with Bucky, though he’s never worked with…dissociated people before.  He says he might not be able to localize it and you all would get whatever I shared.  But it’s Bucky's past just as much as Department X is,” he almost begs.  

Axel gathers up the papers on the floor and shuffles them into a pile.  “I know.  If your friend thinks it’s possible, I’ll bring it up,” he promises.  Steve’s eyes water again, and Axel laughs at him, shoving him harmlessly.  

“You want to go kill some robot children?” Axel asks to move past the moment.  Steve nods eagerly, and Axel leans against the wall and holds out four fingers.  

The orphanage is heavily guarded – barbed wire atop the fence, cameras every few yards, and floodlights that Steve immediately activates.  

“Smooth,” G criticizes in his ear.  They can’t use him as a double agent for this mission, because Department X, if that’s who it is controlling the LMD children, is unlikely to believe the asset’s loyalty.  So G’s in a full-body suit that hides his face and obscures his biometric signature.  He’s creeping around the back of the orphanage, apparently with more success than Steve is having.  

“Shut up.  You at the kitchen doors yet?” Steve asks quietly.  He runs and jumps into some bushes planted against the building where the floodlights don’t shine.  Several yards to his left, he hears the front doors open and a handful of angry, armed guards spill out.  

“I’ve been spotted.  Dealing with it,” G growls in his ear.  Steve ducks to avoid being seen and gets a branch in his cheek for his efforts.  

“Spotted again.  Two dispatched,” G says a minute later.  

“You’re supposed to be finding one to question!” Steve hisses.

“Neither of them were suitable,” G says mysteriously.  Then, “entering the basement. Doesn’t appear there’s anyone down here.  I do see parts for LMDs.”  Steve hears the sounds of a scuffle.  “Hostage taken.  There’s a storage closet on the west side of the basement.”  

Steve looks up at the second-story ledge above his head.  He crouches, makes sure that no guards are in eyesight, and jumps.  His fingers catch the thick, concrete ledge, and he hoists himself onto it before he can lose his balance.

Steve  presses against the old window until the lock breaks with a small _snap_.  He rolls out on the floor of a bedroom decorated in pink and white with two twin beds on either side of the window.  Four little girls sit up in unison and stare at Steve.  

“Shhhh,” he urges wistfully.  One girl opens her mouth, probably to yell, and Steve snatches her from her bed.  Praying that the intel is right, he grabs her wrist and snaps gently.  

Steve knows what bone feels like, and he doesn’t feel bone.  Feeling bolder, he rips the girl’s wrist away to expose metal and wiring.  The other little robots cower against their headboards, and Steve wonders why they’re keeping LMDs in actual bedrooms.  Probably for show when potential victims show up looking to adopt, he hypothesizes.  

“Guess someone has to flip your kill switches,” he mutters at the cowering killers.  They stare at him with big, blue eyes, and he’s not sure he has it in him to smash something so cute.  

Then the handless LMD in his grasp emits a scream unlike any sound a human child can make.  It’s more of a siren, and the other three LMDs open their mouths add their voices to the racket.  

Steve throws the one in his hands against the wall, damaging her enough that she can’t get up and follow, and he takes off running out the door and down the hall.

The lights flip on as he sprints for the staircase that he knows leads to the first floor.  “Anything?” he asks G through the comm.  

“He says they’re something called Political Sciences Division.  It sounds like the scraps of Department X rebranded,” G reports.  “Also, incidentally, I don’t enjoy torturing information out of people.  That’s the Widow’s speed, not mine.”

“Really?” Steve asks as he throws his legs over a banister and hits the ground floor a split-second later.  He takes off running in the opposite direction.  He can hear the confused shouts of guards in all directions, but they don’t have cameras or a PA system inside the orphanage, only the screaming robots.   “I didn’t realize you had, uh, limits.  When it came to hurting people.”

“I didn’t have to hurt him much before he talked,” G criticizes.  “But no.  It makes me think of Bucky, Axel, and Yasha, and I don’t like how that feels.”

Steve’s stomach plummets as he takes another staircase to the second story.  It hadn’t occurred to him when he and G formulated the plan, but they’ve never done a mission in which G was asked to extract information through torture.  He can’t believe he didn’t think of it and connect it to Bucky.  

G always seems so unflappable.  It’s an oversight, but Steve hadn’t considered that even he had limits.  What’s interesting is that G had still gone along with it to learn if they were dealing with Department X or not.  

It’s disappointing to learn that this isn’t the same Department X that tortured Bucky and the others, though it does make some degree of sense.  While organizations like Hydra lived through Steve’s tenure as an ice block and were revealed to still be major threats when he woke up, they did so by spreading their message and forming partnerships with other organizations.  Department X, on the other hand, seemed to kill its old guard whenever a new generation rose to take its place.  It makes sense that some things haven’t survived the decades unchanged.

Even though Steve wants to pulverize Department X, he knows he’ll never fully get that satisfaction.

He ducks inside an empty room and sees that it’s just that – an empty room.  No beds, no LMDs, just a room that doesn’t serve a function.  He probably was right about the mock bedroom from earlier.  It would seem that the tours given to potential parents were both guided and limited.    

“Did he say who’s in charge?” Steve asks G as he listens to footsteps run past the door.  

“Someone named Rodin.  First floor offices.”  

“Incapacitate guards, kill the show-runner,” Steve orders.  G grunts in acceptance, and Steve bursts out of the room to see two LMDs in the hallway, a young boy and a young girl about five or six years old in appearance.  They rear back and pull pistols on him.  

“Damn, they flipped the kill switch on the kiddie LMDs,” Steve warns as he contorts and narrowly avoids getting shot in the liver.  He rushes the LMDs and kicks one hard enough to send it flying down the hallway.  The other one he grabs and smashes against the wall, wrinkling his nose at the sickening whirring sound the LMD makes as it tries to speak slow, childish Russian while it malfunctions.  

He hears guns cocked behind him, and he whirls on the guards, roundhouse kicking one and punching the other in the chest.  They both crumble, and he takes their guns.  

He knocks out the other guards that he encounters in the hallways but doesn’t see any more LMDs.  On a hunch, he enters the room that the blueprints had identified as the cafeteria, and he’s treated to the creepy sight of dozens of LMD children sitting motionlessly at neat, empty tables like they’re on their best behavior and waiting for a meal.  

Only they’re doing neither – they’re powered down, and Steve wants them to stay that way.  He slowly backs out the way he came and only talks to G when he’s far away from the dining hall.

“Okay, robotic kids are some of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen,” he tells G.

“Then don’t come in here,” G suggests.  Steve’s pace quickens at that, and he rounds the corner to the administrative offices quickly.  

There’s a stack of bodies on the blue and green tile, but somehow, Steve knows that’s not what G means.  G looks up from a computer he’s examining and shrugs in the direction of the bodies.  

“They wouldn’t give up Rodin.  I couldn’t tell who was in charge.”  

“What’s on that computer?” Steve asks.  G hesitates.  “Tell me.”

“Not files, but some pictures and sparse information.  The greatest successes of Department X.  Perhaps as motivational materials for the pathetic generation who can only invent decoy children to murder low-level senators and obscure governors.”  His voice picks up speed as he talks, and that’s how Steve knows he’s emotional – even more so than earlier when he’d laid out his torture compunctions.  

Steve knows what he means, but he still has to ask.  “Are there pictures of Bucky?”

“Yes,” G admits.  Steve makes to round the desk, but G lashes out at him.  Steve tries to get by him, and G aggressively blocks him again.  “Some things you can just hear about, Steve,” he mutters.  

“G, I already know what they did,” Steve tries to reason.  

“For fuck’s sake, Steve, he won’t want you to see that shit!” G yells angrily from behind his full-face mask.  

Then the floor creaks in the corridor outside the office, and Steve doesn’t have to turn around.  

“There are thirty armed robot children behind me, aren’t there?” he asks.  

“This is stupid,” G says, deadpan.  He unstraps one of the machine guns from his back and hands it to Steve.  Then Steve turns around and the shootout starts.  

Later, after the LMDs are a layer of rubble with twitching hands and moving eyes amid rubber and soot, Steve calls it in.  In the hour it takes for SHIELD to show up, most of the guards will regain consciousness and disappear, and SHIELD can decide how they want to handle this bizarre story.  Steve leaves the orphanage with G for once, knowing that there’s no reason to stay.  

And he’d just be tempted to boot up the computer with the pictures of Bucky, anyway.  

They trek through the snowy forest back to their vehicle four miles away, their breath pouring out of their mouths like cigarette smoke.  G takes his hood off as soon as he can, scowling as the night air hits his skin.  

“Axel told us about the magician,” he says, unsolicited.  Steve raises an eyebrow because it’s not like G to start a conversation.  It actually isn’t like G to still be with him when the mission is essentially over, so apparently he has something to say.  

“Yeah, Dr. Strange,” Steve provides.

“It’s good.  I don’t think his memories are real anymore – they’re bedtime stories. Maybe Strange can help him keep his mind off the time in the cage.”  

“So you’re on board?  Do you know about Yasha and Bucky?” Steve asks.  

“Yasha’s a sheep waiting for Axel to make up his mind, and Bucky is unnecessarily complicating things as usual,” G sneers.  

“Well, they have realistic concerns.  Obviously you’re all protective of your mind, and the thought of letting a stranger into it is probably uncomfortable,” Steve feels the need to defend Bucky and the others.

“Fuck it; it can do more good than harm.  I’m in,” G says.  Then he pauses and goes under, letting Yasha come out for the rest of the trek.  

Steve doesn’t know if it bodes well or not that G’s the first one on board.  

 

 

They fly back to New York separately, still careful to cultivate the image of schism, and Steve picks Bucky up from the airport in his glasses, baseball cap, and oversized sweatshirt.  As disguises go, it’s not very solid, but he has to laugh when Bucky walks off the plane in a similar getup.   

Steve takes Bucky’s duffel bag and slings an arm around his shoulders as they leave JFK International.  He feels Bucky’s shoulders tense, and they do get a few looks but nothing hostile.  Bucky doesn’t relax, and Steve has to remind him quietly as they exit out to the rainy street that two men are allowed to show affection in public now.  

Sam meets them at the curb in an SUV from the Stark fleet, and he greets Bucky with barely any hesitation.  As a veteran counselor, Sam doesn’t hold Bucky’s disorder against him, and he understands his need to hide and defend his brothers.  As Steve’s friend, however, Sam still has his doubts culled from the deception that Bucky and his brothers executed, or more specifically, the emotional turmoil it put Steve through.  

It would be helpful if Sam were authorized to know what kind of missions Steve and G have been taking, and what kind of metaphoric trust falls they involve.  But belonging to SHIELD all too frequently means keeping secrets from friends, and the Avengers and their associates have learned to talk around these closed-off topics.

“Barnes,” Sam greets Bucky, clearly having no idea which brother he’s seeing.  

“It’s Bucky.  Hey Sam,” Bucky greets him with the same slight warmth.  Steve slides into the front seat where he’s come prepared with food and drinks, and he passes a sandwich and a cup of tea back to Bucky.  He keeps the cup of coffee for himself; he wasn’t sure who was going to get off the plane, so he came prepared for any of them.  

Steve flips the radio on and toggles the stations for a few minutes before he finds a classic rock station.  Bucky nods from the back seat as he bites into his sandwich, and Steve turns to face Sam as he puts the car into drive.  They rehash an old conversation about Tony’s antics as Sam pulls into traffic and guides them back to Stark Tower.  

They use the underground parking garage just in case any of the Avengers’ enemies are watching the tower.  The general public doesn’t know what happened to the man from the Battle of Washington, and they have yet to associate him with the Avengers’ one-armed associate from a few years back.  Groups like AIM, however, know better.  

Sam pulls into a desirable spot, and JARVIS welcomes them in. He also announces that he’ll alert Mr. Stark of their arrival.  

“Fantastic,” Bucky says sarcastically, even though Tony’s probably the Avenger he likes best after Steve.  Tony spent weeks designing the cybernetic arm and asking for input from all four of them at every stage of the process, and despite his general…Tony-ness, he’s likely the least phased by Bucky’s dissociative identity disorder.  

“Dr. Banner is with him, and Agent Romanov will be arriving shortly,” JARVIS adds.  Bucky yanks off his glasses and removes his hat, handing them to Steve, before climbing in the elevator ahead of Steve and Sam and mashing the penthouse button with his metal fingers.   

Tony and Bruce are tinkering with the armor in the lab attached to Tony’s personal quarters, but they put it aside excitedly as Bucky and Steve enter.  Bruce shakes their hands and Tony chatters a mile a minute as he practically strips Bucky’s shirt off in his haste to check over the arm.  He remembers a few seconds too late that he should ask permission before feeling up one of the most storied international assassins, but Bucky’s relaxed and loose enough to let it slide, despite the upcoming appointment with Strange.  

Bruce orders Thai food, and they eat at one of Tony’s conference tables with Natasha and Pepper eventually joining them.  Steve fields most of the conversation, but Bucky’s much more willing to interject or laugh at Steve’s version of things than he used to be, and the atmosphere is calm and convivial.  

Steve glows with it as he drinks his third craft beer.  He’s spent so much time in safe houses and solitary hotel rooms the past few months that it’s like a balm to be among friends, able to tell jokes and trade stories once more.  The fact that he can reach out and rest his hand on Bucky’s knee makes it all the more perfect.  

“Okay, Buckminster – as much as I like to see the rosy glow of love on Steve’s cheeks, I need to talk to the deadly one,” Tony says as Bruce and Steve start to gather the plates and takeout containers.  Bucky gives Steve a small smile that promises an exciting night later in their apartment, but he holds out four fingers and slips under.  Yasha wakes up, shoots a flirtatious smile at Natasha, and sinks under; then G wakes up and looks coldly at the off-duty Avengers.  

“What?” he asks, eyeing the dirty plate in front of him.  Steve tips the remaining chicken out of the container and onto the plate, and G stabs it with a fork and sniffs at it.  He puts a piece in his mouth and chews as Tony questions him about the maneuverability and resistance of the arm, all questions that G’s the most qualified to answer.  Natasha watches him closely out of the corner of her eye, but G can sense it, and he smirks at her.  

Steve doesn’t really get their relationship – they’re openly antagonistic towards each other, but they seem to implicitly trust one another in a fight.  They’ll probably end up sparring later tonight, and they’ll be revved up enough that Natasha will find Clint and G will send Bucky to Steve already perspiring and flushed with exertion.  Which Steve can’t really complain about; he’s always liked the way the sheen throws Bucky’s muscles into even sharper definition.  

And Natasha’s the one who helped them set up their front organization and the payment systems that filter into the nonprofits set up to rebuild what the Avengers’ battles have destroyed.  

The night goes like Steve expects it to go.  Natasha challenges G to a sparring match;Tony drifts back to his armor maintenance with Bruce; Steve and Sam go back to Steve’s apartment to continue drinking and catching up; and Pepper puts her feet up and acquires two companies by tapping on her StarkPhone.

G comes back to the apartment shortly before midnight.  His mouth and chin are covered in dried blood ostensibly from his nose, and he’s limping on his left foot.  He looks exhilarated, and he tears off his t-shirt and steals Steve’s beer as he crosses the apartment.  A minute later, Steve hears the shower start up.  

Sam gets to his feet.  “I know how this goes.  I’ll see you tomorrow, man,” he says, raising his eyebrows suggestively.  Steve smiles sheepishly – he can take a little teasing on the matter because it’s been days since he had Bucky under his hands.  

As soon as Sam leaves, Steve goes into the bathroom.  He can see the silhouette of Bucky’s body through the misted glass door, but he has no idea who’s driving it right now.  He’s also under no illusions that any of the brothers will be out soon.  Especially after the cold of Russia, they’re all going to take their time in the shower.  

He knocks on the glass door, appreciating the vague shape of Bucky’s form through the glass.  “It’s me.  Any idea when I can have Bucky?” he asks politely, trying not to hurry along whoever’s in the shower.

“Five minutes.  Why is my nose broken?” a voice that sounds like Yasha’s calls back.  

“Natasha,” Steve tells him.  Yasha doesn’t say anything, apparently content to let Natasha rough his body up.

Nearly twenty minutes later, Steve’s lying on his back on the bed he shares with Bucky whenever they’re in town, and Bucky emerges from the bathroom water-logged and slippery.  He swings a leg over Steve and straddles his hips, and Steve runs his fingers from Bucky’s neck to his ribcage, water droplets gathering in the webbing of his fingers.  

“You nervous about tomorrow?” Steve asks, voice husky with want.  Bucky looks down at him.  

“You think I’m going to jump through a window again?” he teases darkly.  Unconsciously, they both look up at the floor-to-ceiling window just a few feet away from the foot of the bed, and Steve grips Bucky’s waist.  

“No,” he says honestly.  “But I think anyone would be nervous to let someone in their head like that.  I’m nervous, and I’m only partially involved.”

Bucky rolls his hips against Steve’s groin, his cock filling out at the contact.  Steve’s been hard since he saw the murky outline of Bucky in the shower, and he’s been patiently trailing his thumb against the head of his cock in anticipation.  

“I am nervous.  We still haven’t completely decided.  Want to talk to him first.  Some of us, including me, can’t shake the fear that he’s working for someone who wants to rip us out of our head.”  Bucky grabs Steve’s hands and places them against the bed by Steve’s ears, lacing their fingers together.  “But I trust you,” he finishes softly.  

It always floors Steve when Bucky shows this kind of faith in him, and vice versa.  By normal standards, they’d have spent a lifetime together and there’d be no hesitancy between them – but there always is.  They were friends, then lovers, then blood brothers…then mourners, then enemies, then combatants still as they danced around each other and tried to outmaneuver the other before they fully understood Bucky’s disorder.  

Add an assassin, a protector, and a foolhardy younger brother in the mix, and sometimes the jumble of loyalties gets cloudy.  

But it’s so clear when they boil it down to this – hands clasped, Steve leading, and Bucky following, usually while complaining.  It’s the way Steve got them into a hundred fights in Brooklyn and the way he got them out of as many tight corners in the war.   

Something must show on Steve’s face, because Bucky rolls his eyes and blushes.  “Hey, don’t be a sap.  Spread your legs,” he commands, slower.  Steve yanks his legs out from under Bucky and drapes them over Bucky’s shoulders as Bucky continues to flush and look at Steve from under his lashes.  Bucky pushes his fingers into Steve’s mouth, and Steve sucks on them, getting them wet and slick.  

“I trust you too,” he mutters as Bucky pulls his fingers back.  

“Of course you do,” Bucky tells him with a grin.  He rubs his fingers against Steve’s hole and presses a kiss to the inside of his ankle.  

 

Dr. Strange’s joint home/office is in Greenwich Village, which is close enough that they can walk.  Axel goes with Steve in another thin disguise, and Strange’s secretary leads them into a plush waiting room with paintings of ethereal beings on the walls.  

“Are these aliens?  Or are they angels?” Axel asks as he scrutinizes one.  Steve squints.  

“Can they be both?” he asks.  At that moment, the door opens and Strange walks in.

Steve’s met Dr. Strange a few times in passing – he doesn’t go on violent missions with the Avengers, but he consults or sometimes gets directly involved whenever they’re dealing with a magical villain.  Steve particularly hates those. He’s still not sure to what degree he really believes in magic. There have been plenty of things that would have seemed like sorcery in his day, that are now accessible and even easy through science.  

He’s more of the opinion that things like Strange’s psychic abilities come from a kind of science that the people of this world (Tony included) can’t understand yet. But, he’s seen Strange in action, and he can’t deny his effectiveness.  

Stephen Strange is a tall, tan-skinned man dressed in a royal blue track suit.  His presence is magnanimous, and he sweeps into the room with Tony’s confidence and Natasha’s grace.  He goes to Axel first, which Steve appreciates.  

“Mr. Barnes,” Strange greets, reaching out a ringed hand.  Axel takes it cautiously and shakes it, and then Strange turns to Steve and repeats the greeting.  “Captain Rogers.”

“Doctor,” Steve returns.  “It’s good to see you again.  This is Axel Barnes, the oldest of the brothers.”  

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Strange says graciously.  “I’ve only heard a little, but I’m very impressed.  I’ve never known anyone to navigate your condition the way you gentlemen have.”  Axel smiles tightly, and Steve tries to move the conversation along.  

“We’re just here to talk today – Axel wanted to meet you in person, and we have some questions about how you think you can help us.”  

“Understandably so,” Strange says with a nod.  He smiles benevolently at the two of them.  “Come in to my study and we can chat.”  

Strange’s study is full of more bizarre objects that only Thor would understand.  Axel calmly takes a seat on the small couch next to Steve, and he sits closer than he normally would.  It’s the only details that betrays his anxiety.  

“Captain, why don’t you explain in person what you’re hoping to accomplish?  Of course I read your emails, but sometimes one corresponds electronically with less a sense of gravity than one would in person.”  Strange seats himself at a tall-backed wooden chair behind an extravagant desk.  Steve sees something purple bubbling on a corner of the desk, but he forces his gaze to Strange.  

“Bucky Barnes, as you know, was held captive from 1944 through 2014 by Department X and Hydra.”  Strange bows his head in Axel’s direction as Steve speaks.  “Contrary to some early information we had, he was awake and dissociated for all of that time, which means he’s lived an entire natural life and many of his memories have been lost.”  

“So, these memories have not faded through ill-design or harmful weaponry, but simply through natural channels?” Strange interrupts.  

“Right.  He was able to free himself during the events in Washington, and he’s been with me ever since in a professional and a romantic capacity,” Steve says.  He brushes over the time that Bucky and the others spent on the run.

“Congratulations – I had a feeling it was something along those lines,” Strange says, his smile smug.  When Axel looks sharply at him, he breaks composure and snorts.  “Oh, please.  It’s the Village.  No one will look askance at you for a same sex romance for blocks.”  

“Anyway,” Steve steers, “One of the things that’s been hardest for him in adjusting to his autonomy and the modern world is the fact that he’s forgotten significant amounts of his childhood, and his memories of captivity are so strong.  We’re not asking for you to change anything in his head – we’re just hoping you can share some of my memories with him to flesh out what he does remember.”  

Strange steeples his fingers, and Steve feels his doubt in Strange for the first time.  He’s been approaching this with almost unfailing belief in Strange’s abilities, but the considering look on the psychic’s face is making him question Strange’s willingness.  

Sure enough, Strange tells them: “I am happy to help in cases where memories have been lost due to magic or science, but in the case of the Barnes, nothing malicious seems to have occurred.”  

“Nothing _malicious_ ,” Steve says sharply.  He leans forward.  “He was a prisoner of war for seventy years – he was tortured and operated on and dehumanized until his mind split four ways to deal with everything that was happening to him.  There’s nothing more _malicious_ ,” he spits.  

“Steve,” Axel warns next to him, and Strange holds up a hand.  

“I’m certainly not denying the horror of what happened to you.  I simply meant that nature has taken its course, and we must be cautious when trying to undo what nature has done.”  

“Can you help him?” Steve asks point-blank.  Strange steeples his fingers again maddeningly, and Axel stirs at Steve’s side.  

“Doctor Strange,” he speaks up.  “Nothing about this is natural.  My body is old enough to have fathered your father, and yet I look like a man about to start his life.  The serum that I have has been the cause of a lot of suffering, and it’s robbed us of the things that young men do.  But we – the three of us – are creations of a broken mind.  Bucky Barnes isn’t.  He’s a child of immigrants who battled poverty for years to take care of a scrawny little punk who became Captain America and saved the world twice from Hydra’s rule.  Without him, the world would be a very different place – and he’s owed something by the world,” Axel argues passionately.  

“I disagree with your premise.  I don’t think the world owes anybody anything,” Strange tells them.  “But I do have compassion, and your Bucky is more than deserving of that.  I will need to speak with him, though.”  

Axel looks at Steve, and Steve nods.  He watches Axel hold out a finger and close his eyes.  Bucky wakes up a minute later, looking around at his bizarre surroundings seemingly at peace.  If Steve and Axel, his two pillars, have deemed it safe, then Steve knows he won’t be afraid.  

“Hello,” Strange says awkwardly, unsure if he should introduce himself again.  

“Hi,” Bucky answers.  He crosses his arms and legs and looks to Steve to catch him up in the conversation.  

“Bucky, Strange is going to help us.  He wanted to see you, because it’s your memories in question,” Steve tells him.  

“Have all of your identities consented to this?  Because I have not extensively studied the minds of people in your situation.  I am not fully confident of my ability to direct Steve’s memories only to you,” Strange says.

“Yes,” Bucky answers simply.  He’s completely clueless about Axel’s impassioned defense of him moments before, but Steve will certainly share it later.  

“And you are aware that you will see Steve’s memories, not your own?”  

“Yeah.  It doesn’t matter – the only memories I really care about are the ones where Steve was with me.”   

“And this was your idea?” Strange probes.  Bucky hesitates, and Steve remembers that it wasn’t.  It was his idea, hatched with Axel, and they haven’t actually talked about it much.  Bucky’s too stubborn to ask for this for himself, but Steve is more than willing to give it to him.  

“Not initially.  But there were some great arguments about it in here,” Bucky taps his head, “and I’m on board.”  

“How do you communicate with each other?” Strange asks.  Steve settles back into the couch and listens as Bucky and Strange start to lay out their plan.  

After the meeting, they walk back to Stark tower at the height of noon.  It’s approaching summer in New York, and the people brushing by them are wearing short sleeves and shorts.  In his baggy disguise clothes, Steve can feel the damp sweat spots clinging to his skin and making him appreciate air conditioning all the more.  He thinks about tucking Bucky under his arm, but it’s too hot for it.  

After deliberating a minute, he swings his hand forward and grabs Bucky’s moist palm in his own.  Bucky starts, like he’s afraid someone will run out of a shop at them, but Steve remembers what Strange said about the Village.  

And he remembers Axel’s words – the world owes something to Bucky Barnes, and not having to be afraid of this is a start.  They can each unlearn the fear that their own time ground into them and people like them.  

“Knock it off,” Bucky says, embarrassed, as Steve refuses to let go of his hand.  He drags his feet and lets Bucky pull him along for the fun of it.  

“Trust me?” he asks.  Bucky makes a face at him.  

They walk hand-in-hand through the Village and back to downtown Manhattan and the tower.  “People are staring at us,” Bucky mutters.  

“Because we’re so damn attractive,” Steve promises.  Bucky makes another pull for his hand, but a vendor calls out to them as they pass.  

“Young love!  Young love, you should buy flowers for your boyfriend!” the vendor calls indiscriminately at the two of them.  They swivel their heads in unison to see the cart brimming with roses in every shade, and Steve laughs as Bucky yanks and pulls him away from the stand.  

“Sorry, not today!” he calls back.  Then he turns to Bucky and grins.  

“Young love my ass,” Bucky complains.  He pushes through a crowd of pedestrians, hand still cupping Steve’s, and Steve catches a glimpse of his turned-away face in a window as they pass it.  Bucky does look young – uncomplicated and effervescently young, and _happy_ , even through his embarrassment.

Steve hasn’t seen that unadulterated look on his face since they were teenagers whirling around their apartment to the tinny music from a record player, Bucky leading and Steve following and no one really learning so much as they were goofing around, and he realizes that he never actually expected to see that look again.  

After everything – the pain and the years and the terror – heaped on Bucky, Steve was completely happy to live with the shattered ghost of his best friend, because it was enough.  It was more than he would have ever prayed for, and more than he deserved.

But like a weed pushing through the concrete to the sun, Bucky has never failed to break through life’s roughness and emerge, beautiful and strong, on the other side.  He’s isn’t an unbreakable boy like Steve once thought him.  He’s a healer, and his light comes from inside his own mind.  He made his own salvation, and Steve stops and stares at him with the realization.  

“What?” Bucky asks, confused.  

Steve goes back for flowers while Bucky shouts at him.  

 

 

They return the next day with Bruce to serve as a calming influence and a chaperone.  He’s the only one they both could agree upon, even if he’s probably more fascinated by the procedure than with remembering to look out for Steve and Bucky while they’re both in the “trance-like state” that Strange described.  

They meet in Strange’s office again, and Bruce is offered the desk chair.  Strange directs Steve and Bucky to sit on the couch from yesterday and relax.  

Bucky’s spine is straight and tense, which doesn’t bode well for the next hour.  Steve rests a hand on the back of his neck and massages the knots he can reach with his thumb.  

“So I’ll project Steve into your mind – into the ‘living room’ you described, and he’ll be able to send his thoughts out to you,” Strange reminds them.

“Everything I think?” Steve wonders, worrying about little things like itches and errant thoughts about Bucky’s rear.  

“We’ll pull memory strands, and once you grab ahold of one, it will all come,” Strange promises.  Steve still isn’t completely sure how to do it, but Strange has assured them that it will be easy.  

He takes a deep breath, looks at Bucky for confirmation, and sinks back against the couch cushions.  He feels Bucky do the same at his side, and he reaches out blindly to grab Bucky’s hand.  

“Listen to my voice,” Strange commands.  Steve feels something brush over him that’s warm and soft, even though he thinks it’s just the words hitting the language centers of his brain.  

He sinks backwards, because apparently the couch is deeper than he thought.  He feels suspended, like he’s hanging inches above the floor, and then the voice is back after what feels like hours.  

“Go find Bucky,” it commands.  Steve blinks, and he realizes that he’s not on a couch at all – he’s standing on Rodney Street looking up at the cheap, brick tenement building where he and Bucky rented a home years ago.  His pulse quickens, and he jogs towards the building.

He lets himself in and walks up the stairs, pulse pounding in real life, and that’s when he realizes that real life and whatever _this_ is are separate.  He’s…he must be in Bucky’s mind.  Or in his own mind.  Or in some place between the two.

He wonders if Bucky’s home.

He pauses with his hand on the imaginary doorknob and forces himself to focus.  The door…the door doesn’t look right.  It’s the right color – brown – but the shade is off.  The number 10 isn’t crooked.  The carpet looks too clean.  As he realizes these things, the details fix themselves – door darkening, number tilting, and carpet wearing out before his eyes.  

One deep breath later, he opens the door and goes inside.  

There are four men inside the apartment.  They’re clearly brothers – they have the same eyes and the same coloring, but their hair and clothing is different.  

The first one to spot him is dressed just like the Winter Soldier.  His metal arm is silver like it used to be, and his hair falls down to his shoulders and covers his face partially.  His eyes are smeared with something black, and they widen when he sees Steve.  

The second man has long hair down to his back.  He’s dressed simply in dark, shapeless cotton clothes, and he can’t contain his grin when he sees Steve.  He has two regular, skin-covered arms.  

The third man has short, slicked back hair and two arms just like the second.  He’s wearing a smart military uniform, buttons shining, and his eyes are unfocused like he’s daydreaming even in here.  

The fourth man has short, messy hair.  He’s wearing a dirty work shirt and suspenders, and there’s a cap on his head.  He’s facing the opposite wall, and while he has two arms, he’s holding one against his stomach like he’s wounded.

Apart from that detail, though, it’s the spitting image of Bucky just off a factory line, paycheck in his pocket and probably scheming to spend half of it on new art supplies for Steve.  

“Bucky,” Steve says, half out of love and half out of heartbreak for this young, honest kid with no clue what his future held in store for him.  

Then Bucky turns around, and his eyes look much older than the image Steve is matching up to his appearance.   His eyes are haunted and knowing, and Steve cries out and stumbles forward.  

“Don’t,” Axel and G order in unison as Steve reaches for Bucky.  He pulls his hand back as Bucky beams at him and moves forward.  It doesn’t dim the dark look in his eyes, but it’s exactly like Bucky looks in real life.  

Happiness through the scarring.

“You can’t touch in here.  It’s not real, so forcing anything makes it unstable.  Especially for you,” Axel says apologetically.  Steve creeps forward and sinks to his knees inches away from touching Bucky, and the other three crowd in, maintaining only the smallest barrier distance.  

Steve looks at the four of them, temporarily speechless.  This isn’t a privilege that he’d ever thought he’d have, even when Strange described his plan.  He’s actually with the four of them, in the deepest sanctuary they have.  This is where they took shelter through everything, and this is where they made the decisions that brought Bucky back to him.  

His eyes catch on a sofa, and he frowns.  

“That’s not,” he starts to say, and as he says it, the couch fixes itself.  It shrinks, sags, and changes color like a chameleon in the blink of an eye, and suddenly it’s their old couch again.  

“Damn,” Bucky whispers.  “I forgot it was so ugly.”

“I don’t like it,” G growls.  The other three yell at him in a mix of languages.  

Steve’s eyes drift over the wallpaper and it changes to the appropriate shades of green and brown.  His eyes meet the strange furnishings, and they slot back into their rightful dimensions and places.  The room feels like it shrinks around them, and G complains that Steve needs to make it bigger while Yasha stares in awe at the changes.  

“I remember this now,” he mumbles.  

“The window!” Bucky and Axel shout.  Somehow, even though they can’t touch, they herd Steve over to the window.  It’s a blur of color like a watercolor palette left out in the rain, but Steve focuses, and the grocer comes back into view.  Yasha and G push up against the window to see, too, and Steve steps back.  

“Start with a memory, Steve,” the voice suggests.  The brothers look around for the source of the voice, and then they look at Steve expectantly.  

Steve’s eyes catch on the kettle perched atop the stove, and he remembers Winifred Barnes giving them the kettle with the flimsy excuse that it was too small and she wanted to buy a new one.  Steve knew that she gave them the kettle because he was always getting sick; he never wanted to put Bucky’s parents out, but he always seemed to do it anyway.  He even stole their son, at first just for a roommate and eventually by falling in love with him and depriving them of a daughter-in-law and grandbabies.  

Bucky gapes at the kettle with wide, wet eyes and mouths _ma_.  That’s when Steve realizes that the memories are spilling into the other occupants of the apartment.  

So he does what Strange told him to do, and he grabs ahold of the memory strand and pulls.  

It’s hard to stop it after that.  Like a roll of film, the whole thing spools out when he pulls, and images and words flash through his mind and across the room until the air is thick with the colors of them.  Winifred, Sarah, Joseph, George, Rebecca…into the Howling Commandos…and back to Brooklyn.  His mind weaves back and forth, unconcerned with constructing a narrative and more interested in pouring out flashes related by some underlying pattern.  

_Dance halls. Docks.  Factories.  Bars.  Coney Island.  Drugstores._

_Steve sick and Bucky wiping his brow.  Bucky dancing and Steve stirring his drink._

_Kissing.  Touching.  Fighting.  Bucky’s hands washing Steve._

_Brawls.  Bullies.  Bucky standing up for him.  Steve arguing that Bucky was a hero._

_Bullets.  Bombs.  Cold tents.  Bucky falling (no, no, no, think about something else)_

_Bombed-out bars.  Drinking an entire bottle.  The cube.  The plane (no, no, no!)_

_Sunday school.  Ms. McGillicuddy.  Rosaries.  Schoolbooks._

_Pencils.  Crayons.  Paint.  Bucky posing.  Bucky’s litheness and youth, paired with his blush._

_Brooklyn.  Home.  Bucky listening to the radio._

Steve feels like he’s drifting again, buoyed back and forth by waves, and gradually he becomes aware that he’s moved to the ugly, beaten couch.  

Bucky’s sitting right next to him, cap askew.  “Relax.  Shhhhh,” he whispers as Steve realizes the waves are making him nauseous.  

“What?” Steve starts to ask but can’t formulate a question.  

“I think we’re all reeling a little. But it took something out of you, and you’re not used to how things feel in here.  Just relax,” Bucky soothes.  As Steve drifts, the brothers talk quickly to each other.

It feels like the conversation is different every time he opens his eyes, and Steve floats from one discussion to another  One minute, Axel and Bucky are talking about Bucky’s parents, and the next, Bucky and G are fighting about the apartment again.  Then Yasha’s asking about a girl.  Then G and Axel are waving their hands and shouting at something – it looks like Axel’s trying to calm G down.  

Steve’s always used the term ‘brothers’ to refer to Bucky and the others out of respect for how Bucky sees them, but it isn’t until that moment that he really sees them as that.  As a family; loud and bickering and intertwined so deeply that they have layers of language all to themselves.  

He smiles, thrilled to see such an amazing sight, and recognizing that he’ll probably never witness it again.  

“We’re going to talk about the airplane, Steve,” Bucky warns from his side.  Steve feels warm beside him, even though Bucky’s keeping the requisite few inches between them.  

“Yeah,” he acknowledges hazily.  But he wants to see more while he’s still in their mind.  “Play the story game,” he requests on a slur.  

Yasha laughs, and G throws up his hands and refuses to play with cheaters.  He moves away, only for Axel to reclaim him, while Bucky shakes his head and tells him, “It’ll make you crazy too, to listen to us for too long.”  

Steve doesn’t care.  He holds on to the living room and the four of them as long as he can, until his mind is too tired, and he wakes up on a different sofa in a different version of the world.  

Steve leans on Bucky as they walk home, Bruce staying to talk to Strange about some of his own theories regarding the Hulk.  Steve feels exhausted yet exhilarated, and he wants to skip and fall over in turn.  

“This is not the way home,” Bucky scolds him as Steve accidentally-on-purpose takes a wrong turn in his euphoria.  

“You can’t not feel it.  With what just happened, you know we have to actually go there,” Steve insists.  Bucky sighs, but he doesn’t protest.  

The orange line takes them into Brooklyn, and they walk with their shoulders pressed together.  

There’s a current in the air, like the borough itself is welcoming its most tragic son home.  Steve sees coffee shops and office buildings that he’s never seen before, but they feel familiar and homey like they sprang up out of the Brooklyn soil just like him and Bucky.  

This is the first time he’s been able to coax Bucky into Brooklyn this century.  Most of the familiar sights are gone, but there’s enough to tether the _now_ to the _then_.  Bucky’s been too overwhelmed to set foot in Brooklyn, but Steve can still feel where the trail of memories had flowed out of him and into Bucky, and he can tell that Bucky is eager to make connections now that he’s remembered and is continuing to remember again.  The memories war with his discomfort, and only a few minutes in, Steve can tell that he made the right choice in coming here.  

Tomorrow, he and Bucky are leaving separately.  They’re going to China to track down a RAID lead there, and they won’t see each other for probably at least a month.  

So they make tonight count.  They spend the night walking around.  It’s warm, and the breeze coming off the east river is invigorating, and they see the important things.  They go to Rodney street, then the church, then the docks.

Around five in the morning, they need to start heading back to the tower.  They head to the Brooklyn Bridge without question, and Steve’s smile feels like it’s going to split his face in two.

“How does it feel?” he asks.  

“Coming back here, or the memories?” Bucky asks.  

“Both,” Steve answers honestly, because they’re almost one and the same.  

“I can’t say.  It’s a lot,” Bucky says honestly, and Steve doesn’t press him.  

“You’re happy though, right?” he checks.  Bucky swings his face to him and grins.  

“Yes, punk.  Of course I’m happy.”  His eyes catch on a spot on the railing, and he stops, smile sliding off his face.  

“What is it?” Steve asks with concern.  

“I am happy,” Bucky repeats, then he pauses.  They reach the spot he’d fixated on and stop walking.  Bucky reaches out to touch the railing.  “But I remember when I wasn’t.  I remember…I was going to jump from here, once.  I was going to kill the body so they couldn’t have it.”  

The confession rolls Steve’s stomach.  He’s known that Bucky thought about suicide a lot in the early days with Department X – he’d honestly have been shocked if Bucky didn’t.  

And he knows that Bucky made attempts.  It’s like swallowing bile to even think about it, but again, he doesn’t blame Bucky.  

But this is new.  He wasn’t aware that Bucky’s escape to Brooklyn in the sixties almost lead to an east river grave.  He grabs for Bucky, suddenly afraid.  

But of course, Bucky’s fine.  Even if he had jumped, it obviously wouldn’t have killed him.  Not souped up on serum like he and Steve are.

Steve remembers coming here as children, to a spot probably only a few dozen yards away, and staring down into the ripples of the river.  They’d watch the boats and and the birds, and they’d dare each other to jump in.  Obviously they never did, because they were human and breakable – especially Steve.

But now they aren’t so breakable.  And Steve needs to cover up this memory for Bucky – needs it to be as happy and freeing as the other memories from Brooklyn, instead of causing him to look like he’s transported back to that awful moment of fear and pain just standing here.

So Steve climbs up on the railing and meets Bucky’s widened eyes.  “Dare you to jump in,” he repeats the barb of their childhood.  

“Get down from there,” Bucky chides automatically.

“No; I’m not 95 pounds anymore,” Steve says stubbornly, and Bucky reaches for him but he bats his hand way.  “I dare you to jump in with me.”  

“You are the dumbest prick in New York,” Bucky tells him with an eye roll.  Steve swings his arms out dramatically and lets go of the railing.  “Steve!” Bucky screams as Steve plummets, arching his back and pointing his fingers to cut through the surface of the water.  

He goes under, feels the slick caress of the water, and resurfaces.  He shakes his hair off his forehead, and a second later, Bucky hits the water beside him.  

Bucky crests again and glares at Steve.  “You stupid, goddamn punk,” he starts to rant.  Steve can tell he doesn’t mean any of it.  “Going to get us hit by a boat, or eaten by a shark.”

“What boats?  What sharks?” Steve teases.  

“The ones that always find your trouble-seeking ass!” Bucky shouts.  Steve kicks his feet to tread water and pulls Bucky in close, kissing him through the layer of river water on his lips.  “Probably parasites in this,” Bucky mutters as Steve wraps his hand loosely around Bucky’s neck and kisses him again and again.  

When he finally pulls away, he rests their foreheads together.  “I didn’t want contemplating your final moments to be your most significant memory from that bridge,” he whispers.  

“Steve,” Bucky grunts and wraps his arms around Steve.  

“I mean it,” Steve continues.  “You have your older memories, but you’re also making new ones every minute.  You’re clean, and you’re safe, and you’re living whatever life you want, Buck.”

“I’m not clean.  You made me jump in a river,” Bucky whines back in a low voice.  He grips Steve tighter and lets Steve tread water for the both of them.  

“You’re clean of all that stuff that matters.  Bucky, this is like a baptism,” Steve says as he looks up at the bridge over their heads.

“I’m clean,” Bucky repeats, more serious.  

“Clean, whole, and free,” Steve promises.  

Bucky leans back and closes his eyes, letting his feet float up until he’s level with the surface of the water, tendrils of it bobbing across his body and his face.  Steve kisses his forehead and then wraps one arm around Bucky’s neck to anchor him, keeping them in place with the other arm.

Bucky floats under the Brooklyn sky as the stars fade and the sun breaks over the clouds in pinks, blues, and purples like a vibrant, healing bruise.  

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Going Deep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3249332) by [withasideofangst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withasideofangst/pseuds/withasideofangst)




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